GORIS, Armenia
\nAlbert Petrosyan strapped his son\u2019s wheelchair and a few bags to the roof of his ancient Russian-made car ahead of another long drive after fleeing his home in Nagorno-Karabakh this week and spending just one night in a hotel in this Armenian town.
\nPetrosyan, 71, his wife Geghetsik, 65, and their 30-year-old son Agasi, who uses a wheelchair and has severe learning difficulties, are among more than 70,000 ethnic Armenians to have fled Karabakh so far since Azerbaijani forces retook the mountainous region last week in a lightning offensive.
\n\u201cWe will never return (to Karabakh). We\u2019ll never be able to,\u201d said Petrosyan, a retired mechanic. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to live with Azeris.\u201d
\nEthnic Armenian authorities in Karabakh said on Thursday they were dissolving the breakaway statelet they had defended for three decades. Karabakh is viewed internationally as part of Azerbaijan, but is populated mainly by ethnic Armenians.
\nAzerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has promised to protect the rights of Karabakh\u2019s 120,000 Christian Armenians but most are expected to leave due to deep-rooted ethnic enmity with the mainly Muslim Azeris, exacerbated by memories of war in 1988-94 and again in 2020, when Baku\u2019s forces retook parts of Karabakh.
\nHOME ABANDONED
\nPetrosyan said his family had been pushed to the limit over the past 10 months due to an Azerbaijani blockade of Karabakh that had led to chronic shortages of food, fuel and medicines
\n\u201cA pack of cigarettes cost five thousand dram ($12) and you could hardly find them,\u201d he said. \u201cThe shops were empty.\u201d
\nAfter last week\u2019s Azeri victory, Petrosyan crammed his Zhiguli estate car with as much as he could, including the toolbox he had used to make a living, and the family began the 77-km drive to the border over two days along with tens of thousands of other frightened refugees.
\nAbandoning their four-room house and 1,000 square metre plot of land in Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh, was very hard.
\n\u201cWe built our home so that everything would be nice for him (their son),\u201d said Petrosyan\u2019s wife Geghetsik, through tears. \u201cI won\u2019t be able to find a flat now that will be good for him.\u201d
\nArmenia has made hotel accommodation available in Goris and other towns for the refugees, but Petrosyan said they would move on, first to Armenia\u2019s capital Yerevan, but were unlikely to stay there as his 61,000 Armenian dram ($157) monthly pension would not be enough to live in the city.
\nHe said they would probably stay with relatives who live in a village near Lake Sevan in central Armenia.
\nArmenia has blamed its ally Russia, preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, for not doing anything to help stop the Azeri offensive.
\nBut Petrosyan said he believed Turkey, a close ally of Azerbaijan with which it shares close linguistic and cultural ties, was ultimately behind the defeat of the Armenian state in Karabakh.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s the Turks\u2019 policy. They wanted to kick us out,\u201d he said.
\nArmenia, backed by historians and the parliaments of many countries, says mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One amounted to genocide, a charge strongly denied by Turkey.
\nTurkey\u2019s President Tayyip Erdogan, who backed Azerbaijan\u2019s offensive, has called for a comprehensive peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GORIS, Armenia Albert Petrosyan strapped his son\u2019s wheelchair and a few bags to the roof of his ancient Russian-made car ahead of another long drive after fleeing his home in Nagorno-Karabakh this week and spending just one night in a hotel in this Armenian town. Petrosyan, 71, his wife Geghetsik, 65, and their 30-year-old son […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358993,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-358968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n